This one is also my guess. Water and viable farmland.

Alex Jones™️ Fluoride Mouthwash

Put his likeness on all sorts of things he’d hate and then donate all the money to people and causes he’d hate.

I dunno, US Courts really like upholding intellectual property laws.

One of the funniest things about this is that he can’t just go start another company doing the same thing. Because he’s a moron grifter, one of the cornerstones of his legal defense was that “Alex Jones” as depicted on InfoWars was a fictional character that he had created and been playing for years. He argued that since he was playing a character, he shouldn’t be personally responsible for what he said on the show, as it had nothing to do with his own views–it would be like holding an actor liable for what they said in a film. His appearance, presentation style, and even name were all elements of this fictional character, and he trademarked them as such. InfoWars owns the trademark, which means The Onion now owns the concept of “Alex Jones, the blowhard conspiracy guy who presents weird right-wing conspiracy takes on current events loudly and aggressively.” If he tries to go over to OAN or start a new site doing the same thing, The Onion can (and presumably will) sue him for IP infringement, and they’ll likely win. Legendary levels of self-owning (well, not any more!).

The idea is not just to help people as a one-off in the moment (e.g. “I’m going to feed these people on this date”), but to build durable, long-lasting, self-sustaining dual-power structures. That’s what makes a well run mutual aid collective different from a charity: you’re not just giving things away and saying “here you go; good luck!” You are (ideally) helping people organize themselves in ways that make their communities more resilient long term. Of course, a necessary first step in that process almost always involves just giving people stuff in a way that looks like a charity–people can’t organize themselves effectively if they’re starving, or have no blankets, or can’t get medication, or whatever–but while charity in the traditional sense just stops there, mutual aid is supposed to go further. You help people get the things they need to survive, and then help them build durable organizations that let them help themselves and other people in their community not just survive but thrive (at least as much as they can under current material conditions). The best mutual aid is like an avalanche: the inciting event that starts the whole thing rolling might look like charity, but it picks up people as it goes along until it’s growing under its own momentum.

The Boebert thing was a hoax ( )

KVM & GO

I get why he rubbed some people the wrong way, but I enjoyed him. I think we had a lot in common in terms of life history and interests. Definitely one of our Posters. Shine on you crazy diamond; see you on the other side of this madness, maybe.

“Pidgin” is a linguistics term for the hodgepodge new language that emerges when you throw a bunch of people with no common language together. It’s a cobbled together pseudo-language made out of words from all the “real” languages spoken in an area that people use to communicate across linguistic boundaries. If it solidifies to the point that people actually learn it as a native language, it becomes a creole.

Yeah it would not surprise me at all if they took exactly the wrong lesson from this, but I think doing so would make it crystal clear that they’re not operating in anything like good faith. The percentage of Republicans who voted for Harris was totally unchanged from the percentage who voted for Biden, and the traditional Democratic base just didn’t vote for them. The rightward shift overwhelmingly hurt their electoral performance. If they move even further to the right, that’s just an indication that they actually believe in those policies; they won’t be able to hide behind the fig leaf of “strategic triangulation” anymore. Most of us here on Hexbear are aware of the fact that they actually want to feed immigrants and poor people into a meat grinder, but I’m at least hopeful that this might be the beginning of more ordinary people waking up to that fact.

I don’t really see this as being the other side of the coin at all. Their voter base collapsed precisely because they failed to articulate any kind of positive vision or embrace any policies that might help the vast majority of Americans. People will not turn out to vote for you when you explicitly tell them you’re not going to help them and that they should stop whining.

The real story here is that Trump won the popular vote. That signals an enormous shift in sentiment and culture, and should be the subject of any serious analysis here. This is nothing less than a catastrophic failure of the liberal project and liberal vision–a total implosion of the do-nothing “centrist” political consensus. Democrats have shown over and over and over again that they have nothing to offer the majority of Americans. The Harris campaign was just the apotheosis of the trend: courting capital and neo-conservative ghouls while jettisoning any talk of policies that might help people. This is not a winning election strategy. That should be screamingly obvious now. People are angry, hurting, and looking for anyone that even suggests they understand that pain and might do something about it, even when the suggested solutions make no sense. The only sane response to this result is a SWEEPING reexamination of the neo-liberal consensus. Liberalism in its current form has failed most people, and the Democrats have failed to articulate any message or position that appreciates that. Until someone in the United States starts articulating a positive vision with policies to engender some hope for the future–healthcare for everyone, housing as a human right, SERIOUS action on climate change–the far right will keep winning. They’re the only ones with ideas.

Luxury bones.

The fairness doctrine remains in place for electoral candidates (well, it’s called the Equal Time rule or something, but same idea). If you give one “major” candidate a prime time interview, you have to offer the same treatment to the other. Trump declined the interview.

This is part of why voting third party is not a waste: imagine if 60 Minutes were legally obligated to host PSL or Green Party for a sit down interview every time they gave one of the Ghouls a time slot.

I’m an elder millennial and never got into them either. I generally enjoy the genre that they’re supposedly in, but just never clicked with their stuff in particular. Apparently that was a good gut reaction.

Yeah, it’s fucking terrifying and a needlessly fast/complex process that seems designed to intimidate people doing it for the first time. Like everything else, it is extremely tilted in favor of people who have limitless money to burn and are doing what they’re doing in order to make a profit, not survive. Solidarity, comrade.

I don’t really see any serious trends, tbh. I have more than a few that are out-and-out communists, but lots of them are just libs. I’ve definitely had some NAFO fans, but it mostly just looks like the general population, with maybe slightly larger numbers of radicals (which you’d expect from young people).

I heard a 15 year old say “Jill Stein is a Russian plant” at work today.

This is actually becoming a significant problem in some contexts. I train people in some wilderness first aid skills and also train the Burning Man community mediators / first responder volunteers. We’re starting to get folks who volunteer for us, but are staggeringly bad at knowing how to navigate the world when GPS is unavailable or unreliable. Burning Man’s Black Rock City is laid out like a clock face, with radial streets named for times on the clock and other streets running perpendicular to those named after letters (so an address would be something like “5:45 and G street”). In the last few years, we’ve been increasingly seeing people who want to volunteer to help folks, but struggle to navigate this very, very basic city grid even with the benefit of a map. It’s not so much that they can’t use a paper map–that is a problem, but very few people have ever been any good at orienteering without training–but rather that they’re fundamentally just not used to the idea that you have to pay attention to where you are. GPS exists out there, but without specialized gear, it’s not precise enough to really locate you on the city grid, and since the city shifts location in the Black Rock Desert every year, it’s difficult to hard-code something like that with a specialized app or piece of tech. Map use is a trainable skill that we’re used to incorporating into the curriculum, but the idea that you have to actually look at street signs and dedicate a portion of your brain to remembering your location, trajectory, and relative position has turned out to be extremely difficult to impart to people who have never had to do it. We’ve had to turn away otherwise very good volunteers because “paying attention to your position in space” turns out to be a skill that’s very hard to train for in a limited time frame.